Personal computer users are currently subject to a growing volume of personal digital content that they must process and manage. Email, electronic documents, digital photos, digital music and video are all forms of content that are seeing increasing use and require attention to process or store on a user device. The volume of emails specifically that a user will receive has increased dramatically in recent years. Currently the average user receives 35 email a day, and over 40 Million people in the U.S. spend more than 2 hours a day working with email. Email clients allow users to access their email collections, as well as a variety of other personal data and data generally on a wide-variety of devices, e.g., computers, kiosks, PDAs, and mobile phones.
A growing number of people who typically manage large volumes of email are either beginning to outgrow or are becoming increasingly frustrated with the burden of mailbox overload, as well as the limitations and inefficiencies of traditional folder-based email clients. While search functions are available in present folder-based email clients, these features generally require a user to define a scope for the search, and may not search all of the information needed to locate a desired item. Moreover, the search features in present email clients can be cumbersome to access, and often require excessive user action to operate. In today's world, a user savings of a single click, thereby enabling the user perform an action in two clicks instead of three, is a significant savings resulting in increased efficiency, less frustration, and less repetitive motion.
With the growing volume of personal digital content, especially within email but applicable to other personal digital content, it is increasingly difficult for the user to find what he is looking for in a timely manner. Current email content is typically widely distributed in various folders which may reside across a network on a server. It costs the user time and effort to correctly search over the proper domain of content. A user may have multiple folders in complex hierarchies which are designed to help locate content at a future time. However, these folder structures over time become exceedingly difficult and time-consuming to maintain as content grows.
For an email user, a growing amount of text-based content is contained within email attachments. These attachments are usually binary files in popular formats such as the Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document format. When the user is looking for text-based content in an attachment, he is forced to also recall the title of the document, since search capabilities on the text content of the attachments are not readily available.
The mechanisms for searching for content and related information are time-consuming and frustrating. Users must typically navigate within their messaging client to a separate search window that requires multiple parameters to be entered in order to complete a search. The state of the art treats the concept of searching as a separate feature. This “search” or “find” functionality is not prominently displayed in the user interface. For some messaging clients, advanced search capabilities are offered, but are located deep in the user interface navigation hierarchy and require up to seven separate mouse clicks to enable a full-text, full-repository search. A search that requires a user to enter information, then select a search scope, then select a button to execute a search requires at least three user actions. Users today desire access to information with fewer steps, preferably just one action. Considering the large number of times a user may have to conduct a search for information in today's workplace, and the rise of repetitive motion ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome, it is understandable that users want a more streamlined UI.
The execution of a search with existing messaging clients is inefficient and slow. When a search is performed over a full-body text, full-repository domain, the execution of the search can take minutes to complete. This is in part due to text content that is not indexed in advance of a search, and in part due to cumbersome UI mechanisms for carrying out searches.
The default behavior of the current messaging clients is to search only within a current message context, meaning a current result list or folder. Additional user steps must be taken to increase the domain over which a search is executed; however, this typically comes at the cost of dramatically increasing the time to complete the search.
Moreover, for a given message, the default behavior of present email clients is to search only the message header information, which usually contains only subject and sender data. Additional steps must be taken to enable a search over the body text of email messages, if the messaging client supports such searches at all.
In view of the explosion of personal content and the difficulties in accessing personal content and other desirable information from an email client, and in view of the need to reduce the number of user actions required in searching for needed information, there is a need in the industry to provide an email client that integrates search functions in a more accessible manner, and that conducts more effective searches of a wider scope to facilitate user location of desired information without needless cogitation over where the data may be located or repetitive physical motion.